


Mind Which Lights the World

by Opacifica



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Excessive Philosophizing in Compromising Situations, Extremely Rough Kissing, F/F, Fight Sex, Questionable Authorial Understandings of Robotics, Questionable Fidelity Practices, Questionable Quadranting Practices, Rough Kissing, Shipping of Theseus, The Homestuck Epilogues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-25
Updated: 2020-02-25
Packaged: 2021-02-28 04:06:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,558
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22887526
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Opacifica/pseuds/Opacifica
Summary: Rosebot leans in close. Terezi can smell the licorice-black lipstick, the same kind as always, applied now to synthetic polymer lips inches away from her own. Rosebot's metal fingers close just a little tighter around her neck.No one interrupts this time.
Relationships: Rose Lalonde/Terezi Pyrope
Comments: 4
Kudos: 57





	Mind Which Lights the World

Jagged, age-yellowed nails snag in the intricate web of titanium-reinforced carbon nanotubule mesh that veils the compositional instruments within her torso. In motion, her facsimile of skin is indiscernible from mammalian ectodermal tissue in maneuverability, by far surpassing the physiological parameters of the valetudinary tegument coating the body that moulders in what is fundamentally little more than a negative pressure ventilator and a heparin drip.

She pauses, the meticulously polished chrome veneer of her face reflecting the bared fangs and narrowed eyes of the woman pinned beneath her over its affected smile. Hemocyanin stains the chitinous planes of her face a corpselike grey-blue.

TEREZI: ILL GIVE YOU ONE THING  
ROSE: You’ll give me far more than one thing.  
TEREZI: F1N3  
TEREZI: TWO TH1NGS M4X1MUM BUT L3TS ST4RT W1TH ON3  
TEREZI: WH1L3 3QU4LLY 1NCOMPR3H3NS1BL3 YOUR STR34M OF CONSC1OUSN3SS 1S MOD3STLY MOR3 TOL3R4BL3  
TEREZI: OF TH3 TWO OF YOU  
ROSE: Don’t presume to flip red on me now. Though flattery _will_ get you everywhere.  


Their brief detente concluded, she leans in, pressing a deliberately off-center and tauntingly gentle kiss to Terezi’s lower lip. Her reaction is nigh-instantaneous - measurable in microseconds. Her claws sink into the infinitesimal gaps in the weave of the otherwise impossibly solid body pressing her into the ground.

As one Rose decays, positioned overhead, her own unseeing eyes veiled to the lower proceedings of her consciousness, the other Rose tears.

With proper torsion, evolutionarily-randomized and frequently-chewed-upon chitin beats years of fastidious materials engineering, and she is rent open. Just slightly, exposing a blinking array of impossibly numerous microcontrollers, fitted together with equally exacting care. Muscle of metal, meat of machinery.

TEREZI: STOP FUCK1NG 4ROUND

Unhesitating, Rose adjusts her grip on Terezi’s throat. No less punishingly rigid, but single-handed, now, as her rather scuffed-up left arm forms a bar across her chest, pressing her still-scrabbling claws out of range to do any further damage.

ROSE: I’m only getting started. Patience is a virtue.  
TEREZI: WH4T TH3 FUCK WOULD 4NY OF US KNOW 4BOUT V1RTU3  
ROSE: We all survived each other’s company for this long.  
ROSE: Probabilistically, rather unlikely. If you’re curious about the odds, I could lay them out for you.  
ROSE: Until roughly now, in defiance of all statistical likelihoods of assorted -cides, the better angels of our nature did manage to prevail.  
ROSE: Which does ultimately speak somewhat highly of our capacity to operate as an edge case within the confines of a certain kind of engine of inevitability, if not necessarily -  
TEREZI: TH1S 1S PUR3 TORM3NT  
TEREZI: 1 CH4NG3 MY M1ND  
ROSE: That would be a first.  
TEREZI: SHUT TH3 FUCK UP  
TEREZI: PL34S3 K1LL M3 B3FOR3 1 H3MORRH4G3 V14 MY D3L1C4T3 FL3SHY 4UR1CUL4R C4N4LS  


Her smirk changes just slightly in character.

ROSE: I’m afraid I can’t do that.  
ROSE: Do you really imagine that he would construct a non-Asimovian robot?  
ROSE: He is tragically predictable in many key respects.  
TEREZI: 1 THOUGHT 1 TOLD YOU TO SHUT TH3 FUCK UP  
ROSE: You’re in no position to be making demands.  


She alters her grip, machinery-warmed metallic fingertips digging just slightly into Terezi’s jaw. The kiss is uncontestably flawless, this time. The sensors of her metal tongue faintly register the taste of the copper-ion-bearing porphyrin rings that compose the bulk of Terezi’s teal hemofluid as she brushes her parted lips over the still-exposed fangs, the mouth contorted into a snarl, until she yields, smeared haphazardly with black lipstick and choking on a heavy exhale.

A less tactful person might note that Terezi’s sigh is colored by something more like relief than anything, as they meet in a more traditional kiss, battery-chipped incisors pressing back against unyielding titanium dentition.

That’s better, isn’t it.

Closer to what they both want, at least, which isn’t a cage of whirring machinery walling in a body of fibrous polysaccharide exoskeleton stretched over slightly-too-cool hemolymph and alien-but-familiar configurations of striated muscle. Something different, certainly, not something that could be referenced in either of their memories.

She’s careful in a way she’s never had to be before, closing her teeth delicately over the preexisting marks left by Terezi’s knife-sharp eyeteeth, nipping lightly at her lower lip before deepening the kiss further. Terezi’s fists form and flex futilely. She writhes, quite literally unaccustomed to this position. In this universe, at least, she has soundly rejected the appeal of complete powerlessness at every interval, and she pulls away, panting, before anything can progress much further.

TEREZI: L3T GO OF M3  
ROSE: We are at an impasse unless your negotiation strategy includes concessions as to matters of ripping open my bodice any further. Devastatingly romantic as it is, I have no acute desire to explain the circumstances of my own mutilation.  
TEREZI: F1N3 JUST L3T M3 K1SS YOU B4CK >:[  
ROSE: In the future we can discuss human expressions of politesse such as ‘please’.  
TEREZI: 1S TH1S S1TU4T1ON 1N4D3QU4T3LY HUM1L14T1NG 1N SOM3 R3SP3CT  
ROSE: Rather serviceable, thus far.  


Without any further delay, Rose reconfigures her approach, twining her unyielding metal fingers in Terezi’s hair, its texture sufficiently rough to be perceived by even her most blunt-instrument sensory mechanisms. It’s different, long and coiling easily around her fingertips as she bolsters her by the head, her free hand resting on her chest, now, no longer holding her down.

Terezi’s response somewhat undercuts the acidity of her conversational tone, because she forgoes any thought of kissing back entirely and sinks her teeth into the pliable nanotubule-mesh neck of the robotic model, slicing handily through a stray fragment of Rose’s dress that had somehow managed to cling to her figure. Not anymore. The tapered points of her canines scratch at humming motors, fans, countless processors and delicately interconnected components. She tears the fabric again; Rose reacts with a rather descriptive sigh.

ROSE: Your teeth could stand to be sharper.  
TEREZI: YOU COULD ST4ND TO B3 QU13T3R  
ROSE: We both may as well take this opportunity to get used to disappointment.  


As though they weren’t already, foundationally. She who illuminates by nature must grow accustomed to being unseen. She who understands by nature is seldom actively understood, even by herself.

The corpse continues to fail to weigh in on the philosophical or biomechanical quandaries of the moment, as Rose repositions her metal knee just slightly enough to make Terezi hiss, releasing her toothhold long enough to be hauled back into a kiss. Not the kind of kiss one sets out to write a narrative about. The tongues’ battle for dominance is something of a rout from the beginning. No one is keening. No one is smiling anymore.

When Terezi growls and bites again, tearing with violent intent at the polymerized siloxanes that compose her lips, she makes no effort to shake away, and the sound rattles up from somewhere in her chest, resonates at a familiar frequency, even in this body, even years and light years away from the source of the memory.

She bites back, harder, and Terezi’s nails sink into her shoulder, her grip sufficient to dent if not to damage.

Familiarity is value-neutral.

This is something new, and that is value neutral as well.

She’s grateful nonetheless, that she no longer recognizes the extrahuman resonances of Terezi’s autonomous responses to the roll of their bodies against each other, the heat of her processors attempting to account for the damage inflicted, the sounds of metal-on-metal where something in her shoulder, something in her jaw might actually be damaged.

That’s exhilarating, before anything else. She can’t bleed, but the same flush of equal parts adrenaline and excitement can be furnished without a soup of hormones and neural receptors. The machine is a thing of beauty in both its replication of and distinction from the human experience. Artificial, yes. But she’s always been a being of artifice.

It’s just that now, with half of her lower lip torn off, she has only the frantic hum of pistoning valves and sparking neural-network-connections informing her that her straits, in some contexts, might be interpreted as rather dire.

She’s allowing this, though, participating in it, reveling in the mimeo of a life that isn’t her own, but could have been. Under different circumstances. If she were not herself. Is she herself?

How would _she_ know? Who remains of those she used to believe… knew her?

Her eyes have been closed for years, and she has yet to acquaint herself with blindness in any but the most superficial manner.

Terezi claws through to where her ribcage would be, if she had a ribcage, if _either_ of them had a ribcage, and something seizes in half the constituent actuators of her left side. She tangles her fully-functional hand in her dark hair, which is still too long, and forces her to bare her throat, scraping her teeth over the comparatively thin dermal layer stretched over the internal architecture of her neck and pseudospine.

Her fingers curl and flex and scrabble ineffectually at her chassis as guttural noises spill from her bloodsoaked lips, forming nebulously into words.

TEREZI: ROS3  
TEREZI: _ROS3_  


For a moment, she falters. It only takes a moment.

She tries to inhale.

Her lungs are rotting in a life support capsule several meters away. Useless. Vestigial. Moving shallowly and regularly only with their own mechanized aid. She tries to gasp. And she can’t.

But it’s been three years since she tried.

TEREZI: ROS3 >:?  
ROSE: ...  


==>  



End file.
